Category: Semafor

The US indicted a Mexican governor for drug trafficking, dealing a blow to Mexico’s governing party and risking a major diplomatic rift. Washington accused Rubén Rocha Moya and other officials, including a senator, of protecting the Sinaloa Cartel in exchange for bribes and electoral support. The indictment puts Mexican President ...

Goldman Sachs stopped its bankers in Hong Kong from using Anthropic’s AI models, in the latest sign of expanding US-China tech tensions. The American startup’s chatbots are banned in mainland China, and Goldman’s move suggests US AI firms could increasingly treat Hong Kong as off-limits as well, the Financial Times ...

The price of oil crept back up on Wednesday after US President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s proposal to open the Strait of Hormuz and defended his maritime blockade. Trump met with a group of energy executives on Tuesday to discuss how to minimize impacts from the war as the blockade ...

US President Donald Trump discussed a possible, brief Ukraine ceasefire in a lengthy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. The truce, poised to coincide with Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9, would come several weeks after Kyiv and Moscow negotiated a ceasefire around Orthodox Easter, though ...

France announced a plan to phase out fossil fuels completely by 2050. While other legislatures have similarly ambitious aims — the EU and UK both plan to reach net zero by 2050, which functionally requires ending fossil fuels. What is new is the granularity: The roadmap specifically targets an end ...

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all beat first-quarter earnings expectations on Wednesday, but investors are poised to closely scrutinize their heavy spending on AI. Big Tech has propped up the US stock market — and in many ways, the US economy writ large — in the last year, but investors ...

AI tools can identify the writing of almost anyone with a sizable online presence, rendering much online anonymity impossible. The tech writer Kelsey Piper had Claude Opus 4.7 read unpublished 150-word snippets of her writing; it successfully named her as the author each time. Semafor’s Tom Chivers replicated the finding ...

The News Last week, I got called out for a column where I said Anthropic was winning in enterprise over OpenAI, at least based purely on revenue. Jordan Wilson, who hosts the podcast, called that line “a very SV/Twitter bubble take, not yet backed by real data.” He has a ...

An Oakland jury has begun the process of deciding who’s less popular, Elon Musk or Sam Altman. (Or is there some way for both sides to lose?) While Silicon Valley’s trial of the century is billed as being about nonprofit governance, make no mistake: This is all about putting two ...

David’s view Ruben Gallego’s friends told him to, “lay low,” as he put it, “and this will pass over.” He didn’t agree. The Arizona Democratic senator was right about one thing: This month’s sexual assault allegations against Eric Swalwell, Gallego’s onetime “best friend,” didn’t just destroy the Californian’s political career. ...